Snacks for Satan. An interview with Sean Morris

Sean Morris is a Perth based artist whose illustrations are greatly inspired by trash culture, junk food, girls in bikini, crazy sports, strange rituals and other weird aspects of human behaviour. His line-based drawings are always full of colour but also a bit disturbing. And that’s what make them so amazing!

You often say that junk food is one of your main sources of inspiration. How does food work in this sense? What do you find interesting about fast food?

There are a lot of humorous and dark associations that go with fast food. But it also has a rich visual life beyond just being a food source –a lot of its power comes from aesthetic manipulation, from colour and repetition– the shapes and symbols of fast food are easy and interesting to transfer into drawings.

In your exhibition “Return to Doom Lagoon”, which we had the chance to see this year at Watdafac Gallery in Madrid, we could also see that you have a special interest in rituals. What is the role of food in the rituals you portray?

Snacks for Satan. Devil worship makes you really hungry.

Do you perform any food-related rituals in your everyday life?

Not really. Late night sugar heavy drawing snacks. Gatorade hangover cures. Food life for me is really just one bad panicked decision after another.

What will you eat to survive if you were left in a place like the Doom Lagoon? Tropical fruits? Panthers? Humans?

Fruit before friends.

Another recurring topic in your work is the physical exercise. Is this a way to extinguish the guilt incurred by your fast food veneration?

I’m really interested in flawed human thought processes, like our common ambivalence in the way we realise how good exercise is for us, and how evil eating junk food is, and yet still we do both –so i draw people literally doing these things at the same time.

Do you like any other artists who also use fast food as an inspiration for their work (like for example Marc Trujillo, Thomas Weeks or Sheryo, just to name a few)?